Author Seann Barbour should be no stranger to visitors of this site, as I’ve previously reviewed two of his earlier novellas (2023’s The Last Day and 2024’s The Maw). Seann recently contacted me again to offer a review copy of his latest work, It Came from the Floodwaters, which will be published on Friday, March 13th, 2026.
Like the other books of his that I’ve read, Floodwaters is a lot of fun; lean, mean, action-packed, and to the point, without a lot of extraneous fluff or filler. It clocks in at a hundred pages, more or less, and there’s also a bonus chapter preview of his novel Scurry in the back as well. And even though Floodwaters is basically about vampires, a monster I’m admittedly ambivalent about, the baddies here are original enough to keep things interesting.
The novella is essentially an invasion-style horror set in a single apartment building, along the lines of a movie like [REC] or Infested (both of which I’ve reviewed, here and here). There’s an ensemble cast of tenants fighting the antagonists, but our nominal main character is Tam, who is stuck in the apartment alone because their girlfriend Heather is off on a trip with another girlfriend (it’s a whole poly situation). There’s also a young woman named Britt and her much older boyfriend Henry; two young male roommates named Kyle and Stephen; an older libertarian prepper dude named Lionel; and a couple of other folks who don’t factor into the narrative too much.
At the beginning of the story, the city of Savannah, Georgia is in the midst of a terrible hurricane which knocks out the power. One resident of the building, a man in his sixties named Mark, grabs a flashlight and goes down to the lobby to see what he can see. To his horror, he witnesses floodwaters crashing through the glass front of the building, submerging the lobby as more rain hammers down outside.
He then notices a long wooden box floating in the water, and swears he can hear something banging from inside of it. Thinking someone is trapped in there, he attempts to help, but as you might have guessed, no good deed goes unpunished, and things don’t go too well for Mark.
From this point, the vampire is on the loose, killing the residents of the apartment building one by one. The cool thing about the antagonist(s), though, is that it/they are not quite like the traditional vampire; it’s almost like a weird hive mind thing that calls itself the Elder, and is comprised of the souls/consciousnesses/whatever of all the people it’s killed; it can definitely read minds as well. And its victims, after they are drained, sort of turn into zombies, but with the same thoughts, voices, and memories of all the previous victims.
The way the creature is described in the book, as a matter of fact—as a very tall, not quite solid shadow figure with a vaguely skull-like face—reminded me a bit of Molasar from F. Paul Wilson’s 1981 novel The Keep (which I reviewed here), but it’s definitely its own thing.
So after the Elder has murdered and zombified most of the tenants of the building, a ragtag band of survivors including Tam, Britt, Kyle, Stephen, and Lionel, hole up in Lionel’s apartment, arm themselves from Lionel’s small arsenal, and hope they can live through the night.
Much of the tension in the story arises from Lionel’s belief that all the younger survivors are soft weirdo liberals, and the younger people thinking maybe Lionel is slightly unhinged and a little too excited about the prospect of saving the world from vampires like a macho action hero. There is also a throughline concerning Tam, who is nonbinary and has only arrived at a place in their life where they feel like they belong somewhere, but is still unsure enough to be seduced by the Elder’s promises to make the “special” Tam into one of them.
This was a tight, well-written tale that just flew by, with a very high body count and a simple but effective premise. Although the length of the work by its nature means that characterization gets shorter shrift, there is enough background info on the main players (especially Tam) to get a sense of them as people and the dynamic at play between them. Additionally, the lore surrounding the Elder was a neat spin on the traditional vampire, and the vampire’s victims resurrecting gave the story a bit of a zombie flair as well.
If you like invasion-style horror stories with a small band of holdouts fighting a supernatural force, then this should fit the bill nicely; it’s brief, concise, and doesn’t fuck around, so it’s more akin to a quick, nasty sketch than a detailed painting, but enjoyable nonetheless. I’ve really liked all of Seann Barbour’s work I’ve read so far, and this was no exception. Thanks again to the author for the ARC!
Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.
The Scare Salon 